"There is no point in running; one must start at the right time." Almost everyone has heard this moral from the fable The Hare and the Tortoise. We know the story well. During a race, the hare, underestimating the tortoise whom he found too slow, stopped to sleep while his opponent, continuing at a steady pace, reached the finish line and emerged victorious. For a long time, this story conveyed a lesson believed to be timeless about the superiority of regularity and perseverance over speed. But today, speed has become the norm across diverse sectors. In a logic that Karl Marx would surely have analyzed, the development of new information and communication technologies, by transforming our material infrastructure, has gradually shaped a social superstructure where speed has become a condition of efficiency. Now, slowness has become an unforgivable fault. The emblematic tools of our era—smartphones, social networks, rapid transport—all participate in this quest for immediacy. These technological advances have thus established a dictatorship of speed that has ultimately conquered the world of work, consumption, and social relations.
Philosopher Hartmut Rosa has noted this contemporary paradox. The more tools we have to save time, the more time escapes us in this accelerated society. "Always faster" becomes the creed of modernity. From this source that nourishes society emerge other dynamics that shape our daily lives: stress, pressure, and a sense of loss of control. In our country, as major cities fall under the grip of the Internet, social networks, and artificial intelligence, this logic of acceleration has also become a norm to which we must adapt.
Today, the wisdom contained in The Hare and the Tortoise is heading toward obsolescence. Our time seems increasingly distant from that spirit summed up by "mora mora." We must indeed know how to integrate speed into our aspirations for efficiency, success, and social existence. Let us simply remember that speed is a means, not an end. Before taking the path of speed, it is always useful to know one's destination. There is no point in running when one no longer knows why one is running.
Fenitra Ratefiarivony